Interesting and funny Facts

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[janice6]

6 hours ago, gwalchmai said:

So what happens to the radioactive pollutants? Seems to me the smoke and ash would still be radioactive. Does burning make them not radioactive?

Presumably (since I was not involved in the actual experiment) the radioactive particulates are reduced to an inert state.  Whether by dilution or conversion I can't remember.  Iowa state had a federal grant from the Energy department some years ago and my company was interested in how well their process worked.  It was successful.  They used a different plant that was more efficient at collecting radioactive particulates but the principle was the same.

Eliminating Radioactive waste particles is an extremely difficult task.  The only other successful process I know about was in a contaminated site out East, where the largest company that did Earth movement in the world, actually dug out all the contaminated Earth and trucked it to a blast furnace which burned away the radioactive waste and sterilized the soil. 

Then they moved all the soil back to its original location.  It cost a fortune, but worked.  Unfortunately, all the sterilized Earth contained no organic matter and was pretty much useless for anything but building on.

The economical solution is to bury the contamination however, most places do not allow it.  The best solution would be to take the contamination to the Marriana Trench and dump it into the lowest place in the Ocean.  

This was negated by the environmentalists since it could contaminate the fish at that depth.

As you may tell from my post,  I was one of two people assigned by my company to investigate "new business" opportunities.  The subject of Radioactive Contamination remediation was simple.  Money.  Each nuclear energy site in the United States had a budget of $ 1 Billion from Congress specifically for remediation, however, no method that satisfied everyone was ever found.

Still, that many Billions of dollars had to be spent to assure Congress that the problem was being worked on.  So, all the energy sites were looking for any and every way to spend their Billion dollars to show "good faith".

I encountered so many absolutely frightening, beyond anything you can imagine, real examples of contamination that it was terrifying.  Everybody knew, but nobody knew what to do about it.

I told my company to "hike your skirts and run away from this venture as fast as you can!  There was no way we could handle the problem it was so out of control and the contamination was so intense that we had no means to deal with it".  I was asked to quantify how bad the problem was. 

I told them to imagine you are holding a baseball in y our hand......... And it was White hot with radioactivity.  Now imagine you have Millions of gallons of that in one site alone. 

Imagine a river with a radioactive isotope contamination that is 30,000 times the normal level.  We'll be lucky if cities aren't lost to this mess.  I know of three cities endangered at that time, with annihilation.

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